Category: Featured

Creating regular WordPress backups is the best thing you can do for your website. Backups give you a peace of mind and can save you in catastrophic situations when your site gets hacked or you accidentally lock yourself out. There are several free and paid backup plugins for WordPress, and most of them are fairly easy to use. In this article, we will show you the 7 best backup plugins for WordPress.

Important: Many WordPress hosting providers offer limited backup services, but please remember that it is your responsibility to backup your website on your own. Do not rely solely on your hosting provider for backups.

If you are not already backing up your site, then you should pick one of these 7 best WordPress bckup plugins and start using it right away.

1. VaultPress

At WPBeginner, we use VaultPress to backup our site. VaultPress was founded by Matt Mullenweg (WordPress co-founder) and his team at Automattic.

It is a subscription based service with different plans and pricing. VaultPress offers automated real-time cloud backup solution starting at $5 / month (which is good for most websites).

Setting up VaultPress and restoring from backups is just a matter of clicks. With some of their packages, they even offer security scans.

The only downside to VaultPress is that it is a recurring expense that can add up if you have multiple WordPress sites.

2. BackupBuddy

BackupBuddy is the most popular premium backup plugin for WordPress. It allows you to easily schedule daily, weekly, or monthly backups and store them in Dropbox, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, Stash (their cloud service), and even email it to yourself.

The biggest advantage of using BackupBuddy is that it is not a subscription based service. You are licensed to use the plugin on the number of sites mentioned in your plan. You get access to premium support forums, updates, and 1GB of cloud storage to store your backups.

You can even use BackupBuddy to move WordPress to a new host with no Downtime.

3. BackWPup

BackWPup is a free plugin that allows you to create complete WordPress backup for free and store it on the cloud (Dropbox, Amazon S3, Rackspace, etc), FTP, email, or on your computer.

It is extremely easy to use and allows you to schedule automatic backups according to your site’s update frequency.

Restoring a WordPress site from backup is also very simple. The BackWPup Pro version comes with priority support, ability to store backups on Google Drive, and some other cool features.

4. BackUpWordPress

BackupWordPress is a complete WordPress backup plugin with automatic scheduling support. It allows you to create different schedules for your database and files. The only problem is that the free version does not allow you to store your WordPress backups to a cloud storage service.

If you want to store your backups on Dropbox, Google Drive, FTP, etc, then you will need to purchase a premium extension for it. The extensions are available for each service, and you can buy the one you need or the whole bundle.

5. UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus is another WordPress backup plugin. It allows you to create complete backup of your WordPress site and store it on the cloud or download to your computer. The plugin allows you to create scheduled backups and store them to your chosen location. There is a premium version of the plugin with additional features and addons.

The only downside of Updraftplus is that despite having great features, it has a cluttered user interface. This makes it difficult for beginners to locate the options they need. Despite the clutter, it still has a very good rating in the WordPress plugins directory.

6. Duplicator

As the name suggests, Duplicator is a popular WordPress plugin used to migrate WordPress sites. However it is also has backup features.

It does not allow you to create automated scheduled backups which makes it less than ideal for a regularly maintained site to use as its primary backup solution.

7. WP-DB-Backup

With more than 2 Million downloads, WP-DB-Backup is one of the most popular WordPress backup plugins. The only problem is that it only backups your WordPress database.

This means that you will have to backup your media files manually. If you do not update a site too often or do not upload images, then you can use WP-DB-Backup as your primary WordPress backup plugin.

WP-DB-Backup makes it really simple to create database backups, schedule automated backups, and restore your database. It is also a very useful tool for users who do not have access to phpMyAdmin to backup WordPress dataabase manually.

Conclusion

Each WordPress backup plugin has it’s Pros and Cons. We use and recommend VaultPress for two main reasons. First it is extremely easy to use. Second, it offers real-time incremental backups. What that means is that instead of backing up all of your files every day or every hour, it only creates a backup of what has updated and literally within minutes of the update. This is ideal for large sites like ours because it allows us to use our server resources efficiently.

However if you run a small-medium size website and hate paying monthly fees, then we recommend the popular BackupBuddy plugin. Why? Because they have their own cloud storage, Stash, which makes it easy for beginners to store their backups in cloud with a matter of few clicks.

That’s all. We hope that this list helped you pick the best WordPress backup plugin for your site. Make regular backups a habit and save yourself from a lot of trouble.

What is a WordPress Child Theme

A WordPress child theme is a WordPress theme that inherits its functionality from another WordPress theme, the parent theme. Child themes are often used when you want to customize or tweak an existing WordPress theme without losing the ability to upgrade that theme. In the past, there was no easy way of updating WordPress themes without losing all the custom styling and changes that you had made. This becomes chaos when all the sudden you find out a widely used script in popular themes has a major exploit, and you need to update your themes ASAP. It becomes a tough choice because on one hand, you would lose all the custom styles if you update. On the other hand, you risk your site getting hacked if you don’t update fast enough.

The core team and the community decided to solve this problem by introducing the concept of parent theme and child theme. A child theme in WordPress would inherit all the functionality, features, and the code of the parent theme without making any changes to the parent theme itself. This allowed users to change the styling of the parent theme and add/modify features without losing the ability to update the parent theme.

In theory, any WordPress theme can have child themes however not all WordPress themes are good parent themes. A parent theme with limited functionality and features is not exactly an ideal parent theme candidate in most cases. We will talk about the exceptions later on in the article.

A good parent theme also known as theme frameworks usually contains its own action hooks and filters. This allows designers and developers to create a robust custom WordPress site using child themes in a fraction of time.

Why do people use WordPress Child Themes?

Designers and developers use child themes to speed up their development. When using a good parent theme, you can drastically reduce the time it takes for you to create a WordPress site. All good parent themes aka theme frameworks offer tons of functionality and customization options, so you don’t have to code everything. DIY users often create child themes to tweak an existing theme without losing the ability to update the parent theme if needed.

Creating a WordPress child theme can be as simple as creating a new style.css file in a new folder. All you really need is one line in your new style.css header that defines the template (see the Codex for reference). A robust child theme can have just as many template files as the parent theme if not more. A child theme can have template files that are not even available in the parent theme.

When Should You Use a Child Theme?

The decision to use a child theme often depends on your needs. Most sites that we build for ourselves and our clients are child themes of the Genesis theme framework. In rare cases when the project is too complex or too simple, then we build it as a standalone custom WordPress theme. As WordPress developers, we need to streamline our workflow while creating quality themes. Creating a child theme of Genesis framework helps us accomplish just that.

For users we recommend child themes only if you find yourself constantly adding new functions to your theme’s functions.php file and/or constantly adding/modifying the style.css file of your theme. In these cases, we highly recommend that you use a child theme. A short while ago during our WordPress meetup talk, one of the members asked us what if you are only adding custom styles? Is it better to use a child theme or a custom CSS plugin?

The answer to that depends on how savvy and comfortable you are with technology. If you are only modifying the styles of a few elements, then using a custom CSS plugin works just fine. However, if you find yourself changing the entire color scheme, moving things around in the CSS, etc, then you definitely should consider using a child theme.

Recently, one of our users asked us the question what is a WordPress theme framework? Before answering her question we did a quick search, and the results were surprising. There was not a single comprehensive article that explained what is a WordPress theme framework. Majority of the articles were sites listing the top free WordPress theme frameworks or WordPress theme frameworks compared etc. Then there were some theme framework websites ranking among the top. In this article, we will do our best to answer questions like what is a WordPress theme framework, what type of theme frameworks exist, why do people use WordPress theme frameworks, advantages and disadvantages of using a theme framework, should you use a theme framework, and lastly what is our pick for the best WordPress theme framework.

What is a WordPress Theme Framework?

The term WordPress theme framework often refers to a code library that is used to facilitate development of a theme. In the old days of WordPress, there were some crucial problems with the way how themes were developed and maintained. There was no good way of upgrading WordPress themes without losing all the custom styling options. There was no way to prevent copying and pasting of the same functionality code in all themes. While these two issues might not seem like a problem to an average user, these can be disastrous for a few reasons. What if you realized that the same code that you had been using in all of your themes had a security exploit. Even more important, what if this theme was something that you publicly released for others to download and customize. Yes, that’s chaos waiting to happen. The core team and community decided to fix the issues mentioned above by introducing the concept of Parent Theme and Child Theme.

WordPress theme frameworks are intended to be used as a parent theme template where all the functionality resides. Developers can then create a child theme to add custom styling while leaving the functionality aspects of it to the framework. This allows for a centralized location where all the functions are hosted. If the core development team decide to deprecate a WordPress function, or there is a bug found in a specific theme framework, then it is extremely easy to push out an update without modifying anything the child theme has. This method allows you to keep the “framework” of your site strong without modifying how it looks.

What type of Theme Frameworks exist?

Well there are Free one and paid ones… Ok seriously, there are a few type of frameworks that exist. There are complete drag & drop frameworks like Headway Themes that empower users to create everything visually without any knowledge of code. Then there are pseduo-drag drop frameworks like Pagelines and Thesis. These frameworks allow users to drag and drop pre-define sections (similar to how WordPress widgets work). Obviously anyone can define custom sections using the available hooks and filters offered by the frameworks. Then there are theme frameworks that are full of options. Themify and most others fall in this category. Lastly, there are the theme frameworks that are built for developers to get a head start without the clutter and bloat like Genesis by StudioPress.